The Counter-Enlightenment

The Counter-Enlightenment is an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of Enlightenment rationalism and universalism, arguing that their ideas helped shape modern pluralism, historicism and cultural particularism. The essay synthesizes lectures and longer essays on critics of the Enlightenment, especially Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann, whose treatment Berlin later collected separately in Three Critics of the Enlightenment; Berlin termed this movement the Counter-Enlightenment, arising primarily in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany against the Enlightenment's rationalism, universalism and empiricism. In the essay Vico is presented as an early critic of attempts to understand human society through timeless rational principles detached from historical and cultural context.